Why Businesses Embrace Machine Learning [Excerpt]The best algorithms determine who wins and loses in a digital economy that thrives on steering the consumer toward an opportune click
By Pedro Domingos | October 29, 2015

Why is Google worth so much more than Yahoo? They both make their money from showing ads on the web, and they’re both top destinations. Both use auctions to sell ads and machine learning to predict how likely a user is to click on an ad (the higher the probability, the more valuable the ad). But Google’s learning algorithms are much better than Yahoo’s. This is not the only reason for the difference in their market caps, of course, but it’s a big one. Every predicted click that doesn’t happen is a wasted opportunity for the advertiser and lost revenue for the website. With Google’s annual revenue of $50 billion, every 1 percent improvement in click prediction potentially means another half billion dollars in the bank, every year, for the company. No wonder Google is a big fan of machine learning, and Yahoo and others are trying hard to catch up.

For the first time in medical history, human studies are being designed for the purpose of inducing meaningful reversal of pathological aging processes. Said differently, these clinical trials aim to alter older humans so that they function as much younger individuals.

Even modest success of these studies will result in a paradigm shift that will impart enormous societal benefits, such as sparing Medicare from insolvency.

If I were asked even a few years ago if significant human age-reversal research was feasible, I would have said no. Virtually all attempts to slow aging are conducted in the laboratory setting, far removed from delivery to elderly people who have only a few years of life remaining.